by Barry Eisler
“I’m listening,” I said.
“I want to meet with you,” he said. “I think we can help each other.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes. Look, I’m taking a big chance doing this. I know you might think I had something to do with what happened to your friend, and that you might want payback.”
“You might be right.”
“Yeah, well, I know you can find me eventually anyway. I figure I’m better off explaining what I think happened, rather than having to worry for the rest of my life about you sneaking up behind me.”
“What do you propose?” I asked.
“A meeting. Anyplace you want, as long as it’s public. I know if you listen to me you’ll believe me. But I’m afraid you might try to do something before you’ve listened. Like you did the last time we saw each other.”
I considered. If it was a setup, there were two ways in which they might try to get at me. The first way would be to have people watching Kanezaki, people who would move in as soon as I appeared on the scene. The second would be to monitor him remotely, with some kind of a transmitter, the way they had once done when Holtzer had tried to nail me after proposing a similar “meeting.”
The second way was more likely, because I would have a harder time spotting Kanezaki’s team if they didn’t have to keep him in visual contact. I could use Harry’s bug detector to eliminate the second possibility. I’d have to take him someplace deserted to eliminate the first.
“Where are you right now?” I asked him.
“Toranomon. Near the embassy.”
“You know Japan Sword? The antique sword shop in Toranomon 3-chome, near the station?”
“I know it.”
“Go there. I’ll see you in thirty minutes.”
“Okay.”
I clicked off. Actually, I had no intention of going to the sword shop, much as I enjoy browsing there from time to time. But I wanted Kanezaki and anyone he was with to take the trouble to set up there, while I established myself in a more secure venue.
I took a series of cabs and trains to the Imperial Palace Wadakuramon Gate. With its swarms of tourists, batteries of security cameras, and phalanxes of cops protecting the important personages inside, the Wadakuramon Gate would be a highly inconvenient place to have to gun someone down, if that’s what Kanezaki and company had in mind. Having him go there after I was already set up would force a potential surveillance team to move quickly, giving me a better chance to spot them.
I used Tatsu’s cell phone to call Kanezaki again when I had arrived. “Change of plans,” I told him.
There was a pause. “Okay.”
“Meet me at the Imperial Palace Wadakuramon Gate, across from Tokyo station. Come right now. I’m waiting in front. Approach me from Tokyo station so I can see that you’re alone.”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
I clicked off.
I found a taxi on Hibiya-dori, which intersects the boulevard that leads from Tokyo station to the Imperial Palace. I got in and asked the driver to wait, explaining that I would be meeting a friend here shortly. He clicked on the meter and we sat in silence.
Ten minutes later I saw Kanezaki approaching as I had requested. He was looking around, but didn’t spot me in the cab.
I cracked the window. “Kanezaki,” I said as he passed my position. He started and looked at me. “Get in.”
The driver activated the automatic door. Kanezaki hesitated—a cab obviously wasn’t quite the “public” place he had been hoping for. But he got over it and slid in next to me. The door closed and we drove off.
I told the driver to take us in the direction of Akihabara, Tokyo’s electronics mecca. I watched behind us but didn’t see any unusual activity. No one was scrambling to keep up with us. It looked like Kanezaki was alone.
I reached over and patted him down. Other than his cell phone, keys, and a new wallet, he wasn’t carrying anything. Harry’s detector stayed quiet.
I had the driver use backstreets to lessen the chance that someone could be tailing us. We got out, near Ochanomizu station, and from there continued a series of swift moves in trains and on foot to ensure that we were alone.
I finished the route in Otsuka, the extreme north of the Yamanote line. Otsuka is a neighborhood kind of place, albeit a somewhat seedy one, with a generous offering of massage parlors and love hotels. Beyond the locals who live and work there, it seems to cater primarily to older men in search of downmarket sexual commerce. Caucasians are rare there. If there were a surveillance team and they were white CIA-issue, Otsuka would make for a difficult approach.
We took the stairs to the second-story Royal Host restaurant across from the station. We went in and I looked around. Mostly families enjoying a night out. A couple of tired-looking salarymen avoiding an evening at home. Nobody out of place.
We sat in a corner that offered me a nice view of the street scene below.
I looked at him. “Go on,” I said.
He rubbed his hands together and looked around. “Oh man, if I get caught doing this . . .”
“Cut the dramatics,” I told him. “Just tell me what you want.”
“I don’t want you to think I had anything to do with your friend,” he said. “And I want us to put our heads together.”
“I’m listening.”
“Okay. To start with, I think . . . I think I’m being set up.”
“What does this have to do with my friend?”
“Just let me start at the beginning, and you’ll see, okay?”
I nodded. “Go ahead.”
He licked his lips. “You remember the program I told you about? Crepuscular?”
A waitress came over and I realized I was starving. Without checking the menu I ordered a roast beef sandoichi and their soup of the day. Kanezaki asked for a coffee.
“I remember it,” I told him.
“Well, Crepuscular was formally terminated six months ago.”
“So?”
“So it’s still going on anyway, and I’m still running it, even though the funding has been cut off. Why hasn’t anyone said anything to me? And where is the money coming from?”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Slow down. How did you find out about this?”
“A few days ago my boss, the Chief of Station, told me he wanted to see all the receipts I’ve collected from the program’s assets.”
“Biddle?”
He looked at me. “Yes. You know him?”
“I know of him. Tell me about the receipts.”
“Agency policy. When we disburse funds, the asset has to sign a receipt. Without the receipt, it would be too easy for case officers to skim cash off the disbursements.”
“You’ve been having these people . . . sign for their payouts?” I asked, incredulous.
“It’s policy,” he said again.
“They’re willing to do that?”
He shrugged. “Not always, not at first. We’re trained in how to get an asset comfortable with the notion. You don’t even bring it up the first time. The second time, you tell him it’s a new USG policy, designed to ensure that all the recipients of our funding are getting their full allotments. If he still balks, you tell him all right, you’re going out on a limb but you’ll see what you can do on his behalf. By the fifth time he’s addicted to the money and you tell him your superiors have reprimanded you for not getting the receipts, that they’ve told you they’re going to cut you off if you don’t get the paperwork signed. You hand the guy the receipt and ask him to just scrawl something. The first one is illegible. Later, they get more readable.”
Amazing, I thought. “All right. Biddle asks for the receipts.”
“Right. So I gave them to him, but it felt weird to me.”
“Why?”
He rubbed the back of his neck. “When the program got started, I was told that I would be responsible for maintaining all the receipts in my own safe. I was worried about why the Chief suddenly wanted them, even th
ough he told me it was just routine. So I checked with some people I know at Langley—obliquely, of course. And I learned that, for a program with this level of classification, no one would ask to see documentation unless someone had first filed a formal complaint with the Agency’s Inspector General with specific allegations of case officer dishonesty.”
“How do you know that hasn’t happened?”
He flushed. “First, because there’s no reason for it. I haven’t done anything wrong. Second, if there had been a formal complaint, protocol would have been for the Chief to sit me down with the lawyers present. Embezzling funds is a serious accusation.”
“All right. So you give Biddle the receipts, but you feel weird about it.”
“Yes. So I started going through the Crepuscular cable traffic. The traffic is numbered sequentially, and I noticed a missing cable. I wouldn’t have spotted it except that it occurred to me to check the numerical sequence. Ordinarily you wouldn’t notice something like that because no one ever searches the files by cable number, it’s too much trouble, and anyway, ordinarily the number isn’t even relevant. I called someone at East Asia Division at Langley and had her read the cable to me over the phone. The cable said Crepuscular was being terminated and should be discontinued immediately because the funding was being applied elsewhere.”
“You think someone on this end pulled the cable so you wouldn’t know the program had been terminated?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, nodding.
The waitress brought our order. I started wolfing down the sandwich.
He was feeling talkative and I wanted to hear more. We would get to Harry soon enough.
“Tell me more about Crepuscular,” I said, between bites.
“Like what?”
“Like when did it get started. And how you learned of it.”
“I already told you. Eighteen months ago I was told that Tokyo Station had been tasked with an action program of assisting reform and removing impediments. Code name Crepuscular.”
Eighteen months ago, I thought. Hmm. “Who put you in charge of the program originally?” I asked, although given the timeline, I already had a pretty good idea of the answer.
“The previous Station Chief. William Holtzer.”
Holtzer, I thought. His good works live on.
“Tell me how he presented it to you,” I said. “Be specific.”
He glanced to his left, which for most people is a neurolinguistic sign of recall rather than of construction. Had he looked in the opposite direction, I would have read it as a lie. “He told me that Crepuscular was compartmental classified, and that he wanted me to be in charge of it.”
“What was your precise role?”
“Development of target assets, disbursement of funding, overall management of the program.”
“Why you?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t ask.”
I suppressed a laugh. “Did you assume it was only natural that, despite your youth and inexperience, he recognized your inherent capabilities and wanted to entrust you with something so important?”
He flushed. “Something like that, I suppose.”
I closed my eyes briefly and shook my head. “Kanezaki, are you familiar with the terms ‘front man’ and ‘fall guy’?”
His flush deepened. “I might not be as stupid as you think,” he said.
“What else?”
“Holtzer told me that support for reform would involve funneling cash to specified politicians with a reformist agenda, the kind of reforms favored by the USG. The theory was that, to compete in Japanese politics, you need access to large quantities of cash. You can’t stay in office without it, so over time everyone either gets corrupted because they took the cash or weeded out because they refused to. We were going to change the equation with an alternate source of funds.”
“Funds acknowledged with receipts.”
“That’s policy, yes. I’ve told you.”
“I imagine that, when your assets are signing the receipts, they handle them?”
He shrugged. “Sure.”
I wondered briefly why they hired these guys right out of college. “I’m curious,” I said, “whether you can think of any uses to which someone might want to put signed, fingerprinted documents acknowledging receipt of CIA-disbursed funding.”
He shook his head. “It’s not what you’re thinking,” he said. “The CIA doesn’t use blackmail.”
I laughed.
“Look, I’m not saying we don’t use it because we’re nice people,” he went on with almost comedic earnestness. “It’s because it’s been demonstrated not to work. Maybe you can use it to get short-term cooperation, but in the long term it’s just not an effective means of control.”
I looked at him. “Does the CIA strike you as an organization that’s particularly focused on the long term?”
“We try to be, yes.”
“Well, if you’re not under investigation for embezzlement, and blackmail is an alien notion at the CIA, what do you think Biddle is doing with those receipts?”
He looked down. “I don’t know.”
“Then what do you want from me?”
“There’s one more thing that’s strange.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“Protocol is, before every asset meeting, case officers have to fill out a form with particulars of the anticipated meeting: who, where, when. The purpose is to provide a record that other case officers can use if anything goes wrong. After the Chief’s request, I turned in the form saying I had an asset meeting tonight, although the truth is I don’t, but I left the place of the meeting blank.”
“And you got called on it.”
“Right. Which is weird. No one should be taking an interest in these things before a meeting. They’re for post-meeting contingencies. In fact, half the time, we don’t even bother filling them out until afterward. It’s too much of a pain. And you never hear anything about it.”
“What are you thinking?”
“That someone is observing these meetings.”
“For what?”
“I don’t . . . I don’t know.”
“Then I don’t see how I can help you.”
“All right. It’s possible someone is trying to gather some kind of evidence that I’ve been running Crepuscular by myself since it was terminated. Maybe in case it comes out, that way Biddle or whoever could just blame me.” He looked at me. “As their fall guy.”
Maybe the kid wasn’t so naïve after all. “You still haven’t told me what you want from me,” I said.
“I want you to run counter-surveillance tonight and tell me what you see.”
I looked at him. “I’m flattered, but wouldn’t you be better off going to the CIA Inspector General?”
“With what? Suspicions? Besides, for all I know, the IG and the Station Chief went to Yale together. Remember, as of six months ago, Crepuscular was shut down. At which point it effectively became illegal. And all this time I’ve been running it. Before I go through channels, I need to figure out just what is going on.”
I was quiet for a moment. Then I said, “What are you offering me in return?”
“I’ll tell you what I know about your friend.”
I nodded. “If what you tell me is convincing and valuable, I’ll help you.”
“You won’t renege?”
I looked at him again. “You’re going to have to take that chance.”
He pouted like a kid who thinks he’s made a reasonable request and is hurt that he isn’t being taken seriously.
“Okay,” he said after a moment. “The last time we met, I told you we identified Haruyoshi Fukasawa as an acquaintance of yours by intercepting a letter from him to Kawamura Midori. All we had from the letter was his first name, which is spelled with an unusual combination of kanji, and a postmark for the main Chuo-ku post office.”
That tracked pretty much with what Harry and I had come up with ourselves. “Keep going,” I said.
“There was a lot of information to sift through if we were going to make effective use of those two small bits of information. Local ward domicile records, tax records, things like that. We’d have to work outward in concentric circles starting with the Chuo-ku postmark. That meant manpower and local expertise.”
I nodded, knowing what was next. “So you outsourced it.”
“We did. To a Station asset named Yamaoto.”
Christ, they might as well have just put out a contract on Harry. I closed my eyes and thought for a second. “Did you tell Yamaoto why you were interested in Fukasawa?”
He shook his head. “Of course not. We just told him we wanted to know where a person with that name lived and worked.”
“What happened after that?”
“I don’t know. Yamaoto got us the addresses we wanted. We tailed Fukasawa as closely as we could, but he was surveillance conscious and we never managed to stay with him long enough to follow him to you.”
“You’re not telling me much that I don’t already know. What about Fukasawa’s death?”
“I went to his apartment the other day with diplomatic security to try to surveil him as usual. I told Biddle I didn’t think this was a good idea after our previous encounter, that it was personally dangerous for me, but he insisted. Anyway, I saw a lot of unusual activity. Police cars, and a—a cleanup crew for the sidewalk in front of his building. I looked into it and found out what had happened. When I told Biddle, he got totally pale.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning my impression was that he was both surprised and upset. If he was surprised, it means that someone else was responsible for this. I’m assuming it wasn’t an accident. That leaves you and Yamaoto. Since you’re here and seem to care, I’m also assuming that you and Fukasawa didn’t have some kind of falling out. That leaves Yamaoto.”
“Let’s assume that you’re right. Why?”
He swallowed. “I don’t know. I mean, at a general level, I would guess it would be either because Fukasawa posed some sort of threat or because he was no longer useful, but I don’t know more than that.”
“You ever see Fukasawa with a woman?”